Two Poems by Julian Turner

Worminghall

On the maps it is a place where dragons are,
creatures bred of sun and mud, stilt-skins
that wing the acres over Bernwood Forest,
alighting like giant crows on chimney pots
and gable ends, breathing fire from rebel
mouths, laying waste to the flat land

which smoulders to this day, under the airfields
laid in the War, the Victorian farm built
for us to wreck the summer we took thirteen
kids to smash its windows, show their hatred
of us in poems scribbled in pencil on computer
punch-cards thrown at us attached to stones.

This was seminal. The raw heat of fury
at abandonment, the scratching fingers
and the poor attempts at causing pain, to hurt
us back for all those stinging wounds their loved-
ones left them with — invisible scars that
breathed their damning heat across the contours,

igniting fires that would not be put out.
That poor farmhouse felt it all: the shimmied
stand-offs in the rain, the journeys to the edge
of nowhere and the slow turn back, when fire
had died down leaving just the bitter taste
of ashes smeared like war-paint on their skin.

Ravens

They were on the summit, hoping for sandwiches
on that inhospitable afternoon of broken cloud,
clever birds that could adapt. At that height,
in that climate, even mosses struggled to raise
their heads above the levelling wind but they
were masters of airborne grace keeping an apt
distance from us and taking the crumbs adeptly
on the crusts of blackened, summer snow.

Their limited dependence on the walkers
such as ourselves was not a disadvantage to them.
They were able to eat and, in the brief seasons,
survive on lowly berries and a rare carcase.
They crowned the cloudless summit of Slioch
with the art of compromise that we have lost.

 Julian Turner was born in  Cheshire and his first collection, Crossing the Outskirts, was published by Anvil Press in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection Prize and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. His other poetry publications include Orphan Sites (2006) and Planet-Struck (2011), also published by Anvil. A fourth collection, Desolate Market, was published by Carcanet in July 2018. He took part in the lockdown project, Arrival at Elsewhere, subsequently published by Against the Grain Press to support the NHS. Julian is currently finishing his life-time's work as a counsellor for people with mental health problems. He lives in Otley with his partner.